WD Red 4TB NAS Hard Drive Review

With the recent release of WD’s long-awaited 4TB ‘Red’ model, folks looking to fill their networked-storage box up with the largest density drives now find themselves with two options to ponder. Join us as we establish which drive comes out the victor – WD’s Red or Seagate’s NAS HDD – after their head-to-head battle.

Synthetic: PCMark 7

Futuremark’s PCMark benchmarking suite should need no introduction – it’s been a staple of PC benchmarking for the better part of a decade. PCMark offers a range of tests to gauge every aspect of a computer’s performance and presents it in a simple final result. Thankfully, it also breaks down the overall score with individual subsystem scores (such as Memory, Storage, et cetera) in addition to providing individual test results.

As we’re not too concerned with the performance of the PC as a whole, for our testing here we deselect all default tests and run only the “Secondary Storage” suite, with the hard drive in question as the chosen drive. Tests in this suite range from the loading of applications, running a Windows Defender scan, editing video, gaming and more.

According to PCMark 7, WD’s drive outperforms Seagate’s overall – with the exception of two tests (picture import and Windows Media Center). Since PCMark 8 came out in recent months, I decided to give that a whirl on just these two drives. Overall, it supports PCMark 7’s findings: